Key Moments of the 5th GOP Presidential Debate

After debates defined by boring exchanges about the economy and a revolt against the media, Tuesday night’s GOP debate returned to a familiar format. The candidates mostly stuck to attacking each other (along with President Obama and Hillary Clinton) as they focused exclusively on matters of national security. Donald Trump still dominated the discussion, even when he wasn’t being questioned directly, but Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, the candidates just behind him in the polls, were a bigger presence than they’ve been in previous debates. So far no clear winner has emerged, aside from the word “safe,” which was uttered 55 times as candidates faced off for the first time since the terror attacks in Paris and San Bernardino. Here are thehighlights.

Trump and Bush’s Relatively High-Energy Feud Is hiring a Roger Ailes–approved media coach paying off for Jeb Bush? Uh, sort of? Bush didn’t suddenly demonstrate Megyn Kelly–like poise, but he was the only candidate who consistently went after Trump. He had some help from CNN. In the second question of the debate, Bush was asked to explain why he called Trump “unhinged” after he announced his Muslim ban. “Donald is great at — at the one-liners, but he’s a chaos candidate. And he’d be a chaos president,” Bush said. “He would not be the commander in chief we need to keep our countrysafe.”

Of course, Trump hit back, and the candidates traded personal insults multiple times throughout the debate. At one point Trump revived his “low energy” dig, saying “I know you’re trying to build up your energy, Jeb, but it’s not working verywell.”

Trump accused CNN of being “unprofessional” for setting up other candidates to attack him. Then Bush borrowed an Obama jab, saying that if Trump couldn’t handle a GOP debate, he’d never be able to stand up to Putin. “You’re never going to be president of the United States by insulting your way to the presidency,” Bush added. Trump said it’s working so far, noting that he’s way ahead in the polls. “You know, you started off over here, Jeb. You’re moving over further and further,” he said. “Pretty soon you’re going to be off theend.”

Trump’s Plan to Literally Break the Internet Moderator Wolf Blitzer asked Trump to elaborate on another one of his controversial proposals for fighting ISIS: closing down parts of the internet. “What I wanted to do is I wanted to get our brilliant people from Silicon Valley and other places and figure out a way that ISIS cannot do what they’re doing,” Trump said, winning some applause though his answer didn’t clear upanything.

Later Rand Paul attacked Trump on that point, arguing that shutting down parts of the internet would violate the First Amendment. Trump told Paul, “I’m talking about parts of Syria, parts of Iraq, where ISIS is, spottingit.”

Trump was shocked when audience members booed his vague proposal. What about “the nerds will figure it out” didn’t theyunderstand?

Do the ISIS Strategies Put Forth by Trump and Cruz Involve Killing Civilians? Maybe. As Paul noted in the clip above, during the debate Trump doubled down on his proposal to kill terrorists’ family members, which violates the Geneva Conventions. Also up for some war crimes: Ted Cruz, who confirmed that he’s in favor of “carpet bombing” Raqqa, ISIS’s capital, though Blitzer noted there are “hundreds of thousands of civilians” in the Syriancity.

Then he described hitting particular ISIS military targets, rather than leveling the entire city, so to be fair it seems he doesn’t understand what the term “carpet bombing”means.

The Rubio/Cruz Fight You’ve Been Waiting For After sniping at each other for some time on the campaign trail, the two senators finally had it out — multiple times, actually. They got into heated exchanges on the U.S. intervention in Libya, Cruz’s vote to reign in the NSA’s surveillance programs (Cruz called Rubio’s attacks “knowingly false” and “Alinsky-like”), andimmigration.

Like many Republicans, Cruz is not a fan of what he called the “Rubio-Schumer Gang of Eight” bill, the bipartisan immigration legislation that passed in the Senate two years ago. Rubio accused Cruz of supporting “legalizing people who are in this country illegally” — but Cruz said he has never and will never supportlegalization.

Trump and Cruz Fail to Deliver the Fight You’ve Really Been Waiting For Cruz won’t criticize Trump publicly, but after it was revealed that the senator questioned whether Trump has the “temperament” for the presidency, the front-runner spent the weekend spewing mild Cruz insults. Supposedly, the debate was going to be all about Trump going after his surging rival, but when asked about calling Cruz a “maniac,” Trump said, “Let me just say that I have gotten to know him over the last three or four days. He has a wonderful temperament … He’s just fine. Don’t worry aboutit.”

Trump Actually Won’t Run As an Independent … Probably Though Trump signed a pledge not to run as a third-party candidate, he recently started floating the possibility again. But when Hewitt asked if he’s committed to running as a Republican, he said, “I really am. I’ll be honest, I really am.” He added, “I am totally committed to the Republican Party. I feel very honored to be the front-runner.” In a possible first for debate moderators, Hewittapplauded.

After the debate, Trump toldCNN’s Chris Cuomo that there are “no exceptions” to his pledge. “I’m going to be a Republican, I’m not going to be doing a third party,” he said. “No matter what.” Trump really couldn’t be clearer, but on the other hand, we’ve heard thatbefore.

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1:53 a.m.

Might not be the right guys to achieve that goal

One was ousted from NPR amid allegations of sexual harassment. The other left Fox News shortly after writing a column widely panned as racist and anti-gay. Now they’ve been recruited to help launch a digital news startup with the stated goal of restoring faith in media.

The Trump administration is changing the way it reviews sponsors who want to care for migrant children in government custody — backing off a requirement that all people in the house are fingerprinted.

The fingerprint requirement began in June amid the zero-tolerance policy at the border that led to the separation of some 2,400 children from their parents. The children taken from parents were placed in shelters until a sponsor, often a parent or other family member, could be found and evaluated before releasing the children to that sponsor.

But the addition of fingerprinting has slowed the process and clogged the shelters. Some potential sponsors have said they couldn’t get people in their homes to be fingerprinted because they were afraid. The information is shared with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and officers have arrested some 170 sponsors and others on immigration violations using the fingerprint data.

I am officially declaring e-cigarette use among youth an epidemic in the United States. Now is the time to take action. We need to protect our young people from all tobacco products, including e-cigarettes.

For years, Facebook gave some of the world’s largest technology companies more intrusive access to users’ personal data than it has disclosed, effectively exempting those business partners from its usual privacy rules, according to internal records and interviews. …

The social network allowed Microsoft’s Bing search engine to see the names of virtually all Facebook users’ friends without consent, the records show, and gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users’ private messages.

Facebook permitted Amazon to obtain users’ names and contact information through their friends, and it let Yahoo view streams of friends’ posts as recently as this summer, despite public statements that it had stopped that type of sharing years earlier. …

Facebook also allowed Spotify, Netflix and the Royal Bank of Canada to read, write and delete users’ private messages, and to see all participants on a thread — privileges that appeared to go beyond what the companies needed to integrate Facebook into their systems, the records show

Judges dismiss 83 ethics complaints against Kavanaugh because they don’t have the authority to discipline a Supreme Court justice

A panel of federal judges announced Tuesday that it is dismissing all of the 83 ethics complaints brought against Justice Brett Kavanaugh regarding his behavior during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings.

Their dismissal did not question the validity of the complaints but concluded that lower-court judges do not have the authority to investigate or punish Supreme Court justices.

The complaints about Kavanaugh generally alleged that he lied during his nomination proceedings, made “inappropriate partisan statements that demonstrate bias and a lack of judicial temperament” and was disrespectful to the Senate Judiciary Committee during his September hearing, the panel’s decision noted.

For 2020, the RNC and Trump’s re-election campaign are merging into one organization called Trump Victory

It’s a stark expression of Trump’s stranglehold over the Republican Party: Traditionally, a presidential reelection committee has worked in tandem with the national party committee, not subsumed it.

Under the plan, which has been in the works for several weeks, the Trump reelection campaign and the RNC will merge their field and fundraising programs into a joint outfit dubbed Trump Victory. The two teams will also share office space rather than operate out of separate buildings, as has been custom.

The goal is to create a single, seamless organization that moves quickly, saves resources, and — perhaps most crucially — minimizes staff overlap and the kind of infighting that marked the 2016 relationship between the Trump campaign and the party. While a splintered field of Democrats fight for the nomination, Republicans expect to gain an organizational advantage.

China is running factories in its internment camps. Some of their products end up in America.

This is one of a growing number of internment camps in the Xinjiang region, where by some estimates 1 million Muslims are detained, forced to give up their language and their religion and subject to political indoctrination. Now, the Chinese government is also forcing some detainees to work in manufacturing and food industries. Some of them are within the internment camps; others are privately owned, state-subsidized factories where detainees are sent once they are released.

The Associated Press has tracked recent, ongoing shipments from one such factory inside an internment camp to Badger Sportswear, a leading supplier in Statesville, North Carolina. The shipments show how difficult it is to stop products made with forced labor from getting into the global supply chain, even though such imports are illegal in the U.S. Badger CEO John Anton said Sunday that the company would source sportswear elsewhere while it investigates.

President Donald Trump has ordered the Pentagon to create a unified combatant command for space operations, Vice President Mike Pence announced on Tuesday.

“The U.S. Space Command will integrate space capabilities across all branches of the military, it will develop the space doctrine, tactic, techniques and procedures that will enable our war fighters to defend our nation in this new era,” Pence said during a speech at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Jon, this week you published a piece about the Niskanen Center, a rational, culture-war eschewing, libertarian-leaning think tank that you posit could be the future of the GOP once the party evolves out of its current, absurd form. (This will clearly take a while.)

The piece inspired a Twitter commentator to point out that a lot of the center’s platforms actually sounded like President Obama’s more than anything else — a point with which you agreed. Was the 44th president really a liberal Republican all along?

anyway, Obama took elements of the old liberal Republican agenda that had been banished from the GOP: climate change, health care (where he hired the administrator Mitt Romney had hired in Massachusetts)

Ed Kilgore3:37 PM

I’d say Obama represented a convergence of two developments: Democrats warming to market-based mechanisms for achieving progressive goals, while Republicans abandoned progressive goals they used to share. Both developments were occurring under Clinton, of course.What makes the characterization of Obama as anything other than a standard liberal Democrat a bit questionable, though, is the context: six years of dealing with a Republican-controlled House (later joined by the Senate) dominated by intransigent conservatives.

But Jon’s right: Obama’s own agenda could have been supported cheerfully by those lost GOP liberal/moderates.

Benjamin Hart3:41 PM

yeah. and while jon’s original argument highlights what outliers conservatives in america are compared to other places, it’s tough to imagine obama fitting in as, say, a tory in england

Jonathan Chait3:42 PM

in some ways, tho – the tory stance on health care is to defend a state-run system!

hard to disentangle this from the existing status quo of course

Benjamin Hart3:43 PM

the overarching point is how far republicans have strayed from this flavor of at least semi-rational conservatism. are we decades away from it making a comeback in america, or, like, hundreds of years? does the party have to be electorally wiped out first?

Jonathan Chait3:44 PM

hard to project past “decades”

Benjamin Hart3:44 PM

well, you have to for this chat. I want an exact congressional map of 2142

Jonathan Chait3:45 PM

the conservative movement went from a minority faction in the GOP to the biggest faction by the late 70s/early 80s to the entire party by the 90s

Ed Kilgore3:45 PM

Like all ideologues, conservatives will have to choose between being regularly competitive or occasionally winning big and then wreaking havoc until they are expelled from office.

Jonathan Chait3:45 PM

it depends in part on what happens to democrats. If Democrats move sharply left, it opens more space for Republicans to court moderates Right now, the response to Niskanen’s ideas is ‘Democrats already do that stuff.” but if they didn’t, it would be easier for the GOP to co-opt that space.

I dunno. Conservatives soured on one-time heroes Reagan (before he became a saint again) and George W. Bush when they tried to do things to make conservatism more durable. As I think Jon has said on many occasions, conservatism can never be wrong to these people, so they have a tendency to eat their own as an alternative to ideological adaptation.

Benjamin Hart3:50 PM

it’s a nice little loophole

Ed Kilgore3:51 PM

All these characterization depend, of course, on how you think about Trump’s relationship to conservatism and to the GOP.

Benjamin Hart3:52 PM

indeed, which brings me to my last q: let’s say trump loses big in 2020. what effect do you see that having on the current conservative movement? would they just write him out as an apostate immediately?

Jonathan Chait3:52 PM

yep

it will take more than one loss to dislodge them

Ed Kilgore3:54 PM

Hard to say. I guess Trump may have permanently loosened some of the conservative movement’s once-rigid verities, like free trade. But if he’s trounced in 2020, yeah, I could see a standard conservative with some populist touches succeeding him. And Jon’s right: so long as they can find a scapegoat, conservative Republicans will look everywhere other than the mirror for the problem.

Black people are being left out of America’s opioid epidemic narrative

In the halls of Congress, a short bus ride away, medical professionals and bereaved families have warned for years of the damage caused by opioids to America’s predominantly white small towns and suburbs.

Almost entirely omitted from their message has been one of the drug epidemic’s deadliest subplots: The experience of older African Americans like Rogers, for whom habits honed over decades of addiction are no longer safe.

A 1974 New York state ban on nunchucks that was put into place over fears that youth inspired by martial arts movies would create widespread mayhem is unconstitutional under the Second Amendment, a federal court has ruled.

Judge Pamela Chen issued her ruling Friday in a Brooklyn federal court on the martial arts weapon made famous by Bruce Lee.

The appointment of GOP Rep. Martha McSally to the late Sen. John McCain’s Arizona Senate seat for the new year will push the chamber to a new milestone: The Senate in the 116th Congress will have the highest number of all-women delegations in history.

Six states will be represented by two women in the Senate in the new congress, surpassing the previous record of four states, which was the case in 2011 and again in 2012, 2013 and 2018.

Kristin Gillibrand is still facing blowback from donors from her strong, early stance against Franken

“For every one person who shares a concern with me, I have at least one person thanking me, and it tends to be young women who come up to me with tears in their eyes and say, ‘I can’t tell you how much it meant to me that you stood up and did the right thing,’” Gillibrand said. She added that around the time of the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, there were “a hundred” who came up to her to thank her at protest rallies.

Twitter is making it easier to see your timeline in reverse-chronological order again

The latest incarnation of the original Twitter feed can be accessed by tapping the cluster of small stars — the company calls it the “sparkle” and now so shall we all, forever — and switching to see the latest tweets.